Introducing A9.com

In this age of keeping the search engine capabilities clean and providing a less is more approach, has emerged from virtually out of nowhere to be the leading engine available. People like Google because they aren’t barraged with useless information, flashy banner ads and most of all, annoying pop-up advertisements. People want to get their information fast and without being inundated about the newest car or fad diet. Enter a new player into this domain .

was formed and opened in Palo Alto California in October 2003. Branded as a subsidiary of , Inc., is looking to take over where Google left off. You may be wondering what makes any better than Google? The answer is that offers users search results from five separate repositories.

provides the web and image section and book texts are offered by none other than .

Vast libraries of over 120,000 books on the market today are at the users fingertips should they need references. Movie and theatre references are drawn from otherwise known as Internet Movie Database. provides reference information to this site as well.

What makes A9 interesting is that it captures or snapshots previous searches into memory. As the user searches the web abroad they will continue to build their own history file in case they need to research the information again in the future. also provides a detailed diary that you can maintain. If you think that Google still may have a stronger hold because of its toolbar capabilities, think again, has its own toolbar as well. By using the toolbar, users can retrieve information previously searched quickly and more efficiently.

’s CEO, Jeff Bezos’ vision on bringing together many technologies to help hone in on the best possible way to search the web for exact and detailed information makes a strong competitor in the new search engine marketplace.

Some of the robust features available with are:

• The ability to store a detailed search history to pull information from previous queries. Users can even modify their history files to get the results they are looking for.

• A diary function that allows the user to record and cross-reference information about any web page visited. This feature is integrated with the toolbar.

• Drag and drop a URL by book marking

• Discover feature that displays information that the user might be interested as well.

As of September 2004, this product is still in Beta testing.

By Jakob Jelling